Two German movies that were introduced at last year’s Berlin International Film Festival, and that have been in the headlines of late, Wim Wenders’s "Pina" and Werner Herzog’s "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" are being shown in Japan this February/March. As we are talking about two great masters of New German Cinema making documentary films – both on a cultural topic, and both in 3D – around the same time, this has quite naturally become a topic of interest. Putting aside the fact that the Japanese titles in both cases are ridiculously long, I'm sure everyone who watched the two movies immediately feels like discussing pros and cons.
"Pina", as the title suggests, is a documentary about Pina Bausch and her Tanztheater Wuppertal. As Pina suddenly passed away in June 2009, shortly before the shooting was scheduled to start, the documentary automatically became a tribute to the departed artist. For this reason, the scenes in which Pina herself appears were shot with conventional film – not 3D – during her lifetime. The movie is filled with Wenders’s specialty techniques such as cross-fading pictures of a miniature model of a theater seamlessly into live action footage (or vice versa).
"Cave of Forgotten Dreams" is — again as one can guess from the title — a documentary on the Chauvet Cave, in which the world’s oldest existing paintings were discovered. While the cave paintings of Lascaux and Altamira are said to be more than ten thousand years old, the paintings in Chauvet were created around 32,000 years ago. In addition to drawings of cattle, horses, mammoths and other wild animals, handprints that are believed to be the "artist’s" are included as well. Using a digital camera, Herzog filmed the murals as if licking the walls.
In terms of technique and reason for using 3D, personally I favor Herzog’s attempt. As long as one manages to shut one’s eyes (or better, ears) to the music that is once again awful, 3D certainly is a convincing means for highlighting the spatial relationships between the individual paintings, and the contrast of light and shadow in the cave’s narrow, rugged interior. This must be how the place looked to the people that lived here 32,000 years before our time, and this is also how it must look to those visiting the cave today. I might be thinking a bit too much here, and perhaps 2D would have done the job too, but I guess that’s one aspect the movie inspires the viewer to think about.
Anyway, such argumentation will surely prompt counterarguments suggesting that 3D is a valuable method for highlighting the relationships between dancers on a stage just as well. This is of course absolutely true, and I bet everyone who watches the dance scene that opens "Pina" ends up gazing at the screen in enchantment. However the problem is that, much different from the cave’s interior with its narrow, byzantine construction and slimy, haptic texture, the stage or outdoor settings in which the dancers perform are only simple, spacious structures with a dry texture that is almost purely visual. Stage sets, railway tracks, windows, and other spatially formal elements defined by straight lines or grid patterns appear repeatedly in the background, and a one-point perspective that emphasizes the notion of line symmetry is frequently used. While all this looks quite impressive at first, one gets tired of these tricks pretty quickly.
The one-point perspective is a basic, in-your-face kind of characteristic feature of 3D cinema, and in such cases as “Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein” (1973), where entrails pop out toward the viewer after the victim is stabbed from behind with a pike, the effect admittedly can be striking. From my personal experience with movies, I would call this a pioneering and optimal use of 3D technology. However just because it is so in-your-face, it naturally gets boring when employed again and again. Wenders surely knew that he had to restrain himself in this respect, but considering his notorious soft spot for cutting-edge technology, it was perhaps quite inevitable that he arrived at 3D as this movie’s primary sales point. In that sense, the short film “If Buildings Could Talk…” that was screened at the Venice Biennale of Architecture and as part of the “Architectural Environments for Tomorrow – New Spatial Practices in Architecture and Art” exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, was a somewhat better effort. That is because the SANAA-designed Rolex Learning Center (completed in 2010) that appears in the film is dominated by curves rather than straight lines, as a result of which there is little emphasis on line symmetry.
The demerit that the screen looks darker through goggles didn't really bother me in both "Pina" and "Cave…", much different from James Cameron’s "Avatar" that was presented with great fanfare in 2009, and Tim Burton’s "Alice in Wonderland" (2010), which I found appealing enough even if it were in 2D. This may be due to improvements in screening/goggle technology made in a short period of time, or it’s perhaps just the fact that theaters and caves are dark places anyway, so one doesn't realize that they appear darker in the first place.
During the New Year’s holidays I watched some of Mizoguchi Kenji’s and Ozu Yasujiro’s movies. These I watched on DVD, they were made half a century ago, and the genre is fiction but not documentary, so I guess it doesn't make much sense to compare, but the style of expression seemed much more natural to me than in "Pina" and "Cave". Not in 3D, and not even in color, the analogue video format is truly fertile, and consistent with the story in just proportion. Now this may sound like tedious talk about the "good old days", but that’s not what I'm trying to say. I'm talking about coherence between contents and format, which is why I think filmmakers should think twice about the need to work with 3D.
Immersive media art, which largely disappeared after a short period of popularity, may serve as a useful reference. However, complete immersion requires a screen that is not rectangular but in the shape of a planetarium. Equipping movie theaters with such screens is a time-consuming operation, and the segregation from existing movies and cinemas will be another problem to solve. Add to this the question whether this advanced format can be called "cinema" in the first place. Even in case it will be realized, for the time being the focus is likely to be on SF blockbusters like “Star Wars” or “The Matrix”, while movies on other cultural topics still have a long way to go.
(January 13, 2012)
Ozaki Tetsuya / Editor in chief / REALTOKYO